Bad Problems Don't Stop Being Bad Because Somebody's Wrong About Fault Analysis

Here's a dynamic I’ve seen at least a dozen times:Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline.Bob: Did you know, *actually* article writers don't write their own headlines?…But what I care about is the misleading headline, not your org chart__Another example I’ve encountered recently is (anonymizing) when a friend complained about a prosaic safety problem at a major AI company that went unfixed for multiple months. Someone else with background information “usefully” chimed in with a long explanation of organizational restrictions and why the team responsible for fixing the problem had limitations on resources like senior employees and compute, and actually not fixing the problem was the correct priority for them etc etc etc. But what I (and my friend) cared about was the prosaic safety problem not being fixed! And what this says about the company’s ability to proactively respond to and fix future problems. We’re complaining about your company overall. Your internal team management was never a serious concern for us to begin with!__A third example comes from Kelsey Piper. Kelsey wrote about the (horrifying) recent case where Hantavirus carriers in the recent outbreak on a cruise ship were released and sent back to their home countries on (often) public airplanes. No systematic quarantine seemed in place, and only some of the exposed people were even instructed to self-quarantine. Now in light of new information we think it’s very unlikely that this’d end up being a pandemic (the virus isn’t contagious enough at human-to-human transmission). But sure seems like pure luck rather than careful risk-benefit analysis; we only learned about the low contagiousness from negative tests after the cruise ship passengers were sent home.Seems pretty incompetent for humanity to manage a potential future pandemic this way! Tweeters disagreed. They argued that everything’s fine because in fact the WHO as an advisory body can’t enforce legal quarantine